The presence of noise can be detrimental, if not disabling, to quantum information systems. Currently, the most developed of all the proposed technologies in quantum information science is quantum communication. For example, it can provide keys whose security appears to be a consequence of physical law, as opposed to the presumed difficulty of factoring numbers. A major limitation of quantum communication, however, is that ensuring its security requires aborting the protocol and restarting when the error rate surpasses a certain threshold. In short, in a sufficiently noisy environment, secure quantum communication is impossible.
Accordingly, there remains a need in the art for an optimized quantum information processing system that can represent information so that the error rate is minimized. This can increase the ability of a quantum information processing system to function efficiently in a noisy environment in many cases where it ordinarily would not.